Three bugs, all silent, all in the same feature.
The write always worked. What failed was the refresh after it. That
refresh is called from the mutation's own onExited handler and was
guarded on `busy`, a binding over both processes -- and a binding hands
back its cached value until the change notification feeding it has been
delivered, which inside that handler has not happened yet. So `busy`
read true, refresh returned immediately, and the page kept showing the
old application with no error anywhere. Guards now read the Process
objects directly, where the value is current, and a refresh is no longer
blocked by the mutation that asked for it.
The service also kept its own list of which roles it would accept. It
stayed at seven when the helper and the page grew documents, text and
archives, so choosing a PDF viewer set an error and changed nothing.
It is derived from the snapshot now.
And category matching never worked. DesktopEntries returns a QML list,
for which Array.isArray is false, so the code stringified it into
"Network,WebBrowser" and split on ";" alone -- one token matching no
category. Browsers still appeared because their generic name contains
"web browser" and the terms fallback carried the role by itself.
Archives matched nothing at all, so that row could only ever offer the
application it already had.
The harness that should have caught the first bug passed while it was
live: it set each role to the value it already had and asserted no error
appeared, and the bug produces no error. It now changes a role to a
genuinely different application, requires the service to observe the new
value, and changes it back -- with the contract restoring the original
from the outside however the run ends.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Every role carried a single representative type, so setting "Images"
changed image/png and left image/jpeg wherever it landed. That is how
this desktop ended up opening PDFs in GIMP, PNGs in a pixel-art editor
and MP3s in a video transcoder: nobody chose any of it, applications
registered themselves for everything they could read, and the roles
governed one type each.
Roles now own families and write every type when set, the settings page
exposes the documents, text and archives roles it never offered, and a
new seed command curates a fresh machine during setup while always
keeping a choice the user has already made.
The shipped editor entry launches kitty explicitly. The stock
nvim.desktop sets Terminal=true, which defers to whatever the system
considers default rather than the terminal this desktop themes.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
It is the system settings app for this desktop, so it is named the way
one is. The window is "Settings", the titlebar is "Settings", the
wordmark above the search field is gone, the sidebar's last row is
"About", and the status line reads "Desktop is healthy".
Prose followed the same rule. Forty-odd strings explained what "Panama"
does -- "Panama never animates while idle", "Restore Panama defaults",
"Panama looks in ~/Pictures/Wallpapers" -- which is how a product
describes itself, not how a settings panel describes a setting. They now
say what happens. No user-visible "Panama" remains anywhere in the app.
Two consequences worth naming:
The SUPER+I shortcut's description is user-visible, because the
Shortcuts page is generated from it, so that is renamed too. Rebindings
are keyed by shipped chord rather than description, so no existing
override is orphaned by this.
Three contracts matched the window by title and one matched that
shortcut by description; all four are updated. There are no Hyprland
window rules keyed on the title, so nothing about the window's placement
changes.
The desktop entry is now Name=Settings, but the FILE keeps its
panama-settings name, as does the icon: the dock pins applications by
desktop id, and renaming the file would silently unpin it.
dock-pins-contract covers exactly that.
The dated design docs under docs/superpowers keep the old name. They are
a record of what was decided when, and editing them to agree with the
present would make them lie about the past.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
GNOME's Search panel configures which applications provide results in
gnome-shell's overview and which folders are indexed. gnome-shell does
not run here, so reimplementing those switches would store preferences
that change nothing. Under Panama searching is the launcher's job and
Vicinae carries its own preferences, so the Applications page says where
search lives and how to rebind the keys that open it, rather than
offering settings that would be inert or duplicated.
The nav contract is the more useful half. Adding a settings page means
editing four files, and missing any one of them fails quietly in a
different way: no sidebar row, a row that silently shows Home, a deep
link that redirects to Home, or -- worst -- a missing qmldir entry,
which makes the page "not a type" and takes the entire settings window
down with it. Nothing at runtime cross-checks the four. Having just
added four pages by hand, this checks them statically, and also fails on
a page file that exists but is unreachable.
Verified it catches a missing qmldir registration and a missing
allow-list entry.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Wires the schema entries and routing the codex agent needs for default
applications, weather, vitals refresh, notification timing, and capture,
so its pages can be written against keys that already exist.
Capture directories and encoder arguments are enums rather than free
text. Both are handed to a recorder process, and a settings page has no
reason to expose an arbitrary string there.
ApplicationsPage.qml is a placeholder so the page id can be routed,
registered, and searchable before the real page lands. It is owned by
the other agent and expected to be replaced wholesale.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown